English
XXVII
THE END OF THE PHANTOM'S LOVES
Here ends the written account left to me by the Persian.
Despite the horror of a situation that seemed definitively to doom them to death, M. de Chagny and his companion were saved by the sublime devotion of Christine Daaé. And I owe the rest of the adventure to the words of the daroga himself.
When I went to see him, he was still living in his small apartment on the rue de Rivoli, opposite the Tuileries. He was very ill, and nothing less than all my zeal as a reporter-historian in the service of truth was needed to persuade him to relive with me the unbelievable drama. It was still his old and faithful servant Darius who attended him and showed me in. The daroga received me by the window overlooking the garden, seated in a large armchair where he tried to straighten a torso that must once have been handsome. Our Persian still had his magnificent eyes, but his poor face was very tired. He had had his head completely shaved, which he usually covered with an astrakhan cap; he was dressed in a vast, very simple greatcoat, and in its sleeves he unconsciously amused himself by twirling his thumbs, but his mind remained quite lucid.
He could not recall the old agonies without being seized again by a certain fever, and it was in fragments that I wrung from him the surprising end of that strange story. Sometimes he had to be coaxed a long while before answering my questions, and sometimes, exalted by his memories, he spontaneously evoked before me, with striking relief, the frightful image of Erik and the terrible hours that M. de Chagny and he had lived in the house of the Lake.
One had to see the shudder that shook him when he described his awakening in the troubling half-light of the Louis-Philippe room... after the drama of the waters... And here is the end of that terrible story, as he told it to me so as to complete the written account he had kindly entrusted to me:
On opening his eyes, the daroga found himself stretched upon a bed... M. de Chagny was lying on a couch, beside the mirrored wardrobe. An angel and a demon watched over them...
After the mirages and illusions of the torture chamber, the precise bourgeois details of that tranquil little room seemed to have been invented yet again to bewilder the mind of the mortal rash enough to lose his way in that domain of the living nightmare. That boat-bed, those chairs of polished mahogany, that chest of drawers and its brasses, the care with which those little crocheted lace squares were placed on the backs of the armchairs, the clock and, on either side of the mantelpiece, the little boxes of such innocent appearance... finally, that shelf adorned with seashells, red pincushions, mother-of-pearl boats and an enormous ostrich egg... all discreetly lit by a lamp with a shade set upon a guéridon... all that furniture of a touching, homely ugliness, so peaceful, so reasonable "at the bottom of the cellars of the Opera," disconcerted the imagination more than all the phantasmagoria that had gone before.
And the shadow of the masked man, in that old-fashioned, precise and tidy little frame, appeared only the more formidable. He bent to the Persian's ear and said to him in a low voice:
"Better, daroga?... You are looking at my furniture?... It is all that remains to me of my poor, wretched mother..."
He said other things to him that he no longer remembered; but—and this seemed very strange to him—the Persian had the precise memory that, during that old-fashioned vision of the Louis-Philippe room, only Erik spoke. Christine Daaé said not a word; she moved without sound, like a Sister of Charity who had taken a vow of silence... She brought in a cup a cordial... or steaming tea... The masked man took it from her hands and held it out to the Persian.
As for M. de Chagny, he slept...
Erik said, pouring a little rum into the daroga's cup and showing him the vicomte stretched out:
"He came to himself long before we could know whether you would still be alive one day, daroga. He is very well... He sleeps... He must not be woken..."
For a moment Erik left the room, and the Persian, raising himself on his elbow, looked around him... He caught sight of the white silhouette of Christine Daaé seated in the corner of the fireplace. He spoke to her... he called to her... but he was still very weak and fell back upon the pillow... Christine came to him, laid her hand upon his brow, then moved away... And the Persian remembered that then, as she went, she did not cast a single glance at M. de Chagny, who, beside her, it is true, was sleeping quite tranquilly... and she returned to sit in her armchair, in the corner of the fireplace, silent as a Sister of Charity who has taken a vow of silence...
Erik returned with little phials that he set upon the mantelpiece. And still in a whisper, so as not to wake M. de Chagny, he said to the Persian, after sitting at his bedside and feeling his pulse:
"Now, you are both saved. And I shall soon escort you back to the surface of the earth, to please my wife."
Whereupon he rose, without further explanation, and vanished again.
The Persian now looked at the tranquil profile of Christine Daaé beneath the lamp. She was reading in a tiny book with a gilded edge such as one sees in religious volumes. The Imitation has editions like that. And the Persian still had in his ear the natural tone in which the other had said: "To please my wife..."
Very softly, the daroga called again, but Christine must have been reading far away, for she did not hear...
Erik returned... made the daroga drink a potion, after recommending him to speak not another word to "his wife" nor to anyone, because that could be very dangerous for everyone's health.
From that moment, the Persian still remembers the black shadow of Erik and the white silhouette of Christine gliding always in silence through the room, bending over him and over M. de Chagny. The Persian was still very weak, and the least noise—the door of the mirrored wardrobe creaking open, for instance—hurt his head... and then he fell asleep like M. de Chagny.
This time, he was not to wake again except in his own home, tended by his faithful Darius, who told him that he had been found the night before against the door of his apartment, where he must have been brought by an unknown person, who had taken care to ring before going away.
As soon as the daroga had recovered his strength and his sense of responsibility, he sent to inquire after the vicomte at the residence of Count Philippe.
He was answered that the young man had not reappeared and that Count Philippe was dead. His corpse had been found on the bank of the Opera Lake, on the side of the rue Scribe. The Persian remembered the funeral mass at which he had been present behind the wall of the mirror chamber, and he no longer doubted the crime nor the criminal. Without difficulty, alas! knowing Erik, he reconstructed the drama. Having believed that his brother had carried off Christine Daaé, Philippe had rushed in pursuit along that road to Brussels, where he knew everything was prepared for such an adventure. Not having met the young people there, he had returned to the Opera, had recalled Raoul's strange confidences about his fantastic rival, had learned that the vicomte had tried everything to penetrate beneath the theatre and had finally disappeared, leaving his hat in the diva's dressing room, beside a box of pistols. And the count, who no longer doubted his brother's madness, had in his turn hurled himself into that infernal underground labyrinth. Was anything more needed, in the Persian's eyes, for the count's corpse to be found on the bank of the Lake, where the siren's song kept watch—Erik's siren, that concierge of the Lake of the Dead?
So the Persian did not hesitate. Horrified by this new misdeed, unable to remain in the uncertainty in which he found himself regarding the final fate of the vicomte and of Christine Daaé, he resolved to tell all to the authorities.
Now the investigation of the affair had been entrusted to Judge Faure, and it was at his house that he went to knock. One may guess how a skeptical, earthbound, superficial mind (I say this as I think it), and in no way prepared for such a confidence, received the daroga's deposition. He was treated as a madman.
The Persian, despairing of ever being heard, then set himself to writing. Since justice would not have his testimony, the press might perhaps seize upon it, and he had one evening just traced the last line of the account that I have faithfully reported here when his servant Darius announced to him a stranger who had not given his name, whose face it was impossible to see, and who had simply declared that he would not leave the spot until he had spoken with the daroga.
The Persian, immediately suspecting the identity of this singular visitor, ordered that he be shown in at once.
The daroga had not been mistaken.
It was the Phantom! It was Erik!
He appeared in a state of extreme weakness and held to the wall as if fearing to fall... Having removed his hat, he showed a brow pale as wax. The rest of his face was hidden by the mask.
The Persian had risen before him.
"Assassin of Count Philippe, what have you done with his brother and with Christine Daaé?"
At this terrible challenge, Erik wavered and kept silence a moment, then, having dragged himself to an armchair, he let himself fall into it with a deep sigh. And there, in little phrases, little words, short of breath, he said:
"Daroga, do not speak to me of Count Philippe... He was dead... already... when I came out of my house... he was dead... already... when the siren sang... it is an accident... a sad... a lamentably sad... accident... He fell most awkwardly and simply and naturally into the Lake!..."
"You lie!" cried the Persian.
Then Erik bowed his head and said:
"I do not come here... to speak to you of Count Philippe... but to tell you that... I am going to die..."
"Where are Raoul de Chagny and Christine Daaé?..."
"I am going to die."
"Raoul de Chagny and Christine Daaé?"
"... of love... daroga... I am dying of love... it is thus... I loved her so!... And I love her still, daroga, since I am dying of it, I tell you... If you knew how beautiful she was when she let me kiss her alive, upon her eternal salvation... It was the first time, daroga, the first time, do you hear, that I kissed a woman... Yes, alive, I kissed her alive and she was beautiful as a dead woman!..."
The Persian had risen and had dared to touch Erik. He shook his arm.
"Will you at last tell me if she is dead or alive?..."
"Why do you shake me thus?" answered Erik with effort... "I tell you it is I who am going to die... yes, I kissed her alive..."
"And now, she is dead?"
"I tell you I kissed her thus upon the brow... and she did not withdraw her brow from my mouth!... Ah! she is an honest girl! As for being dead, I do not think so, though it is no longer any concern of mine... No! no! she is not dead! And it must not be that I learn someone has touched a hair of her head! She is a brave and honest girl who saved your life besides, daroga, at a moment when I would not have given two sous for your Persian skin. In the end, no one was thinking of you. Why were you there with that young man? You were going to die besides! Upon my word, she was begging me for her young man, but I had answered her that, since she had turned the scorpion, I had thereby become, of her own free will, her fiancé, and that she had no need of two fiancés, which was quite just; as for you, you did not exist, you already no longer existed, I repeat to you, and you were going to die with the other fiancé!
Only, listen well, daroga, as you were crying like the possessed because of the water, Christine came to me, her beautiful great blue eyes open, and she swore to me, upon her eternal salvation, that she consented to be my living wife! Until then, in the depths of her eyes, daroga, I had always seen my wife dead; it was the first time I saw there my living wife. She was sincere, upon her eternal salvation. She would not kill herself. Bargain struck. Half a minute later, all the waters had returned to the Lake, and I was pulling your tongue, daroga, for I truly believed, upon my word, that you would stay there!... Well!... There! It was understood! I was to carry you back to your homes on the surface of the earth. Well, when you had cleared the floor of the Louis-Philippe room, I came back to it, myself, all alone."
"What had you done with the Vicomte de Chagny?" interrupted the Persian.
"Ah! you understand... that one, daroga, I was not about to carry him straight back to the surface of the earth... He was a hostage... But I could not keep him either in the house of the lake, on account of Christine; so I locked him up quite comfortably, I chained him neatly (the perfume of Mazenderan had left him limp as a rag) in the Communards' vault, which is in the most deserted part of the furthest cellar of the Opera, lower than the fifth basement, where no one ever goes and from which one cannot make oneself heard by anyone. I was quite tranquil and I came back to Christine. She was waiting for me..."
At this point in his account, it seems the Phantom rose so solemnly that the Persian, who had resumed his place in his armchair, had to rise too, as if obeying the same movement and feeling it impossible to remain seated at so solemn a moment, and even (the Persian himself told me) he removed, though his head was shaved, his astrakhan cap.
"Yes! She was waiting for me," resumed Erik, who began to tremble like a leaf, but to tremble with a truly solemn emotion... "she was waiting for me upright, alive, like a true living fiancée, upon her eternal salvation... And when I advanced, more timid than a little child, she did not flee... no, no... she remained... she waited for me... I believe even, daroga, that she a little... oh! not much... but a little, like a living fiancée, offered her brow... And... and... I kissed her!... Me!... me!... me!... And she is not dead!... And she remained quite naturally beside me, after I had kissed her, thus... upon the brow... Ah! how good it is, daroga, to kiss someone!... You cannot know, you!... But I! me!... My mother, daroga, my poor wretched mother never would let me kiss her... She fled... throwing my mask at me!... nor any woman!... never!... never!... Ah! ah! ah! So, is it not?... at such happiness, is it not, I wept. And I fell weeping at her feet... and I kissed her feet... her little feet, weeping... You too are weeping, daroga; and she too wept... the angel wept!..."
As he told these things, Erik sobbed, and the Persian, indeed, had not been able to hold back his tears before this masked man who, his shoulders shaken, his hands at his breast, now rattled in pain and now in tenderness.
"... Oh! daroga, I felt her tears flow upon my own brow! upon me! upon me! They were warm... they were sweet! they went everywhere under my mask, her tears! they went to mingle with my tears in my eyes!... they flowed even into my mouth... Ah! her tears upon me! Listen, daroga, listen, what I did... I tore off my mask so as not to lose a single one of her tears... And she did not flee!... And she is not dead! She remained alive, weeping... upon me... with me... We wept together!... Lord of Heaven! You have given me all the happiness of the world!..."
And Erik collapsed, rattling in the armchair.
"Ah! I am not going to die yet... right away... but let me weep!" he had said to the Persian.
After a moment, the Man with the Mask had resumed:
"Listen, daroga... listen well to this... while I was at her feet... I heard her say, 'Poor unhappy Erik!' and she took my hand!... I, then, was no longer, you understand, but a poor dog ready to die for her... as I tell you, daroga!
"Picture to yourself that I had in my hand a ring, a gold ring that I had given her... that she had lost... and that I found again... a wedding ring, what else!... I slipped it into her little hand and I said to her: Here!... take that!... take that for you... and for him... It shall be my wedding gift... the gift of the poor unhappy Erik... I know you love the young man... weep no more!... She asked me, in a very gentle voice, what I meant; then, I made her understand, and she understood at once that I was for her but a poor dog ready to die... but that she, she could marry the young man whenever she wished, because she had wept with me... Ah! daroga... you think... that... when I said that to her, it was as if I calmly cut my heart in four, but she had wept with me... and she had said: 'Poor unhappy Erik!...'"
Erik's emotion was such that he had to warn the Persian not to look at him, for he was suffocating and had need to remove his mask. On this subject the daroga told me that he himself went to the window and opened it, his heart lifted with pity, but taking great care to fix upon the tops of the trees in the Tuileries garden so as not to meet the monster's face.
"I went," Erik had continued, "to free the young man and told him to follow me to Christine... They embraced before me in the Louis-Philippe room... Christine had my ring... I made Christine swear that when I was dead she would come one night, by way of the Lake of the rue Scribe, to bury me in greatest secrecy with the gold ring that she would have worn until that very minute... I told her how she would find my body and what must be done with it... Then Christine kissed me for the first time, in her turn, there, upon the brow... (do not look, daroga!) there, upon the brow... upon my own brow!... (do not look, daroga!) and they went away together... Christine wept no more..., I alone wept... daroga, daroga... if Christine keeps her oath, she will return soon!..."
And Erik fell silent. The Persian asked him no further question. He was entirely reassured as to the fate of Raoul de Chagny and Christine Daaé, and none of the human race, having heard him that night, could have doubted the word of weeping Erik.
The monster had replaced his mask and gathered his strength to leave the daroga. He announced to him that, when he should feel his end very near, he would send him, to thank him for the kindness he had once wished him, what was dearest to him in the world: all the papers of Christine Daaé, which she had written at the very moment of that adventure for Raoul, and which she had left with Erik, and a few objects that had come to him from her, two handkerchiefs, a pair of gloves and a shoelace bow. At a question from the Persian, Erik told him that the two young people, as soon as they found themselves free, had resolved to go seek a priest in some solitude where they would hide their happiness, and that they had taken, to this end, "the Gare du Nord of the World." Finally Erik counted on the Persian, as soon as he should have received the promised relics and papers, to announce his death to the two young people. For this he must pay for a line in the obituary notices of the newspaper L'Époque.
That was all.
The Persian had escorted Erik to the door of his apartment and Darius had accompanied him to the pavement, supporting him. A cab was waiting. Erik got in. The Persian, who had returned to the window, heard him say to the coachman: "Opera forecourt."
And then the cab sank into the night. The Persian had, for the last time, seen poor unhappy Erik.
Three weeks later, the newspaper L'Époque published this obituary notice:
"ERIK IS DEAD."
EPILOGUE
Such is the true history of the Phantom of the Opera. As I announced at the beginning of this work, one can no longer doubt, now, that Erik truly lived. Too many proofs of that existence are today within everyone's reach for one not to be able, reasonably, to follow the acts and deeds of Erik through the whole drama of the Chagnys.
It is needless to repeat here how much this affair inflamed the capital. That abducted artiste, Count de Chagny dead in such exceptional circumstances, his brother vanished and the triple sleep of the Opera's lighting employees!... What dramas! what passions! what crimes had unfolded around the idyll of Raoul and the sweet and charming Christine!... What had become of the sublime and mysterious singer of whom the earth was never again, ever, to hear tell?... She was represented as the victim of the two brothers' rivalry, and none imagined what had happened; none understood that since Raoul and Christine had both disappeared, the two fiancés had withdrawn far from the world to taste a happiness they would not have wished public after the unexplained death of Count Philippe... They had one day taken a train at the Gare du Nord of the World... Perhaps I too, one day, will take the train at that station and go seeking, around your lakes, O Norway! O silent Scandinavia! the perhaps still living traces of Raoul and Christine, and also of Mamma Valérius, who likewise disappeared at the same time!... Perhaps one day I shall hear with my own ears the Solitary Echo of the North of the World repeat the song of her who knew the Angel of Music?...
Long after the affair, through the unintelligent care of Examining Magistrate Faure, was closed, the press, from time to time, still sought to penetrate the mystery... and continued to ask where was the monstrous hand that had prepared and executed so many unheard-of catastrophes! (Crime and disappearance.)
A boulevard newspaper, which was privy to all the backstage gossip, had been the only one to write:
"This hand is that of the Phantom of the Opera."
And even then it had done so naturally in an ironic mode.
Only the Persian, whom no one had wished to hear and who did not renew, after Erik's visit, his first attempt with Justice, possessed the whole truth.
And he held its principal proofs, which had come to him with the pious relics announced by the Phantom...
These proofs, it fell to me to complete, with the help of the daroga himself. I kept him day by day informed of my researches and he guided them. For years and years he had not returned to the Opera, but he had preserved of the monument the most precise memory and there was no better guide to make me discover its most hidden corners. It was he again who indicated to me the sources where I might draw, the persons to interrogate; it was he who pushed me to knock at the door of M. Poligny, at the moment when the poor man was near death. I did not know him so low and I shall never forget the effect my questions relating to the phantom produced upon him. He looked at me as if he saw the devil and answered only with a few disconnected phrases, but which attested (that was the essential) how much F. of the O. had, in his time, thrown perturbation into that already very agitated life (M. Poligny was what is agreed to be called a man about town).
When I reported to the Persian the slender result of my visit to M. Poligny, the daroga gave a vague smile and said to me: "Never did Poligny know how much that extraordinary scoundrel Erik (at times the Persian spoke of Erik as of a god, at times as of a vile knave) made him 'march.' Poligny was superstitious and Erik knew it. Erik also knew many things about the public and private affairs of the Opera.
When M. Poligny heard a mysterious voice relate to him, in box no. 5, the use he made of his time and of his partner's confidence, he did not wait to be told twice. Struck first as by a voice from heaven, he believed himself damned, and then, as the voice asked him for money, he saw at last that he was being played by a blackmailer of whom Debienne himself was victim. Both, already weary of their management for many reasons, went away without trying to know more deeply the personality of that strange F. of the O., who had sent them so singular a set of demands. They bequeathed the whole mystery to the next management with a great sigh of satisfaction, well rid of a story that had greatly intrigued them without making either of them laugh.
Thus did the Persian express himself concerning MM. Debienne and Poligny. On this subject, I spoke to him of their successors and I wondered that in the Memoirs of a Director, by M. Moncharmin, the acts and deeds of F. of the O. should be spoken of so completely in the first part, only to arrive at saying nothing more or almost nothing in the second. To which the Persian, who knew those Memoirs as if he had written them, observed that I would find the explanation of the whole affair if I took the trouble to reflect upon the few lines that, in the second part precisely of those Memoirs, Moncharmin has kindly devoted still to the Phantom. Here are those lines, which interest us particularly, moreover, since one finds related there the very simple manner in which the famous affair of the twenty thousand francs ended:
"As for F. of the O. (it is M. Moncharmin speaking), of whom I narrated here, at the beginning of my Memoirs, some of the singular fancies, I wish to say but one thing more, which is that he bought back, by a fine gesture, all the trouble he had caused my dear collaborator and, I must confess, myself. He judged no doubt that there were limits to every joke, especially when it costs so dear and when the police commissioner is 'seized,' for, at the very minute when we had given M. Mifroid a rendezvous in our office to tell him the whole story, a few days after the disappearance of Christine Daaé, we found upon Richard's desk, in a fine envelope on which was read in red ink: From F. of the O., the rather sizable sums he had managed to draw temporarily, and in a sort of game, from the directorial cashbox. Richard was immediately of the opinion that one should stop there and not push the affair. I consented to be of Richard's opinion. And all's well that ends well. Is it not, my dear F. of the O.?"
Evidently Moncharmin, especially after that restitution, continued to believe he had for a moment been the plaything of Richard's burlesque imagination, just as, on his side, Richard never ceased to believe that Moncharmin, to avenge himself for some jokes, had amused himself by inventing the whole affair of the F. of the O.
Was it not the moment to ask the Persian to teach me by what artifice the Phantom made twenty thousand francs disappear from Richard's pocket, despite the safety pin. He answered me that he had not probed that slight detail, but that, if I cared to 'work' on the spot myself, I must certainly find the key to the enigma in the directorial office itself, remembering that Erik had not been surnamed for nothing the 'amateur of traps.' And I promised the Persian to devote myself, as soon as I had the time, to useful investigations in that direction. I shall tell the reader at once that the results of those investigations were perfectly satisfactory. I truly did not believe I would discover so many incontestable proofs of the authenticity of the phenomena attributed to the Phantom.
And it is well that one should know that the Persian's papers, those of Christine Daaé, the statements made to me by the former collaborators of MM. Richard and Moncharmin and by little Meg herself (that excellent Madame Giry being, alas! deceased) and by the Sorelli, who is retired now at Louveciennes—it is well, I say, that one should know that all that, which constitutes the documentary pieces of the Phantom's existence, pieces that I am going to deposit in the archives of the Opera, is controlled by several important discoveries of which I may justly feel some pride.
If I could not rediscover the house of the Lake, Erik having definitively sealed all its secret entrances (and still I am sure it would be easy to penetrate there if one proceeded to drain the Lake, as I have several times asked of the administration of fine arts)[12], I have nonetheless discovered the Communards' secret corridor, whose plank wall falls here and there in ruins; and, likewise, I have laid bare the trap through which the Persian and Raoul descended into the theatre's depths. I noted, in the Communards' dungeon, many initials traced on the walls by the unhappy ones who were imprisoned there and, among those initials, an R and a C.—R C? Is this not significant? Raoul de Chagny! The letters are still very visible today. I did not, of course, stop there. In the first and third basements, I operated two pivoting bolts of a system quite unknown to the stagehands, who use only horizontally sliding traps.
Finally, I can say, with full knowledge of the matter, to the reader: "Visit the Opera one day, ask to walk there in peace without a stupid cicerone, enter box no. 5 and knock on the enormous column that separates that box from the front of the stage; knock with your cane or your fist and listen... up to the height of your head: the column sounds hollow! And after that, do not wonder that it could have been inhabited by the Phantom's voice; there is, in that column, room for two men. If you wonder that during the phenomena of box no. 5 no one turned toward that column, forget not that it offers the aspect of solid marble and that the enclosed voice seemed rather to come from the opposite side (for the ventriloquist phantom's voice came from where he willed). The column is worked, sculpted, hollowed and fiddled with by the artist's chisel. I do not despair of discovering one day the piece of sculpture that must have lowered and risen at will, to leave a free and mysterious passage to the Phantom's correspondence with Mme Giry and to his generosities. Certainly, all that, which I have seen, felt, handled, is nothing beside what in reality an enormous and fabulous being like Erik must have created in the mystery of a monument like that of the Opera, but I would give all these discoveries for the one it was granted me to make, before the administrator himself, in the director's office, a few centimetres from the armchair: a trap, the width of a parquet strip, the length of a forearm, no more... a trap that folds back like the lid of a casket, a trap through which I see issue a hand that works with dexterity in the skirt of a dress-coat that trails...
It was by there that the forty thousand francs departed!... It was also by there that, thanks to some contrivance, they returned...
When I spoke of this with a quite comprehensible emotion to the Persian, I said to him:
"Erik was simply amusing himself then—since the forty thousand francs returned—by being facetious with his set of demands?..."
He answered me:
"Do not believe it!... Erik needed money. Believing himself outside humanity, he was not embarrassed by scruple and he made use of the extraordinary gifts of dexterity and imagination that nature had given him in compensation for the atrocious ugliness with which she had endowed him, to exploit humans, and that sometimes in the most artistic manner in the world, for the trick was often worth its weight in gold. If he returned the forty thousand francs, of his own motion, to MM. Richard and Moncharmin, it is that at the moment of restitution he no longer needed them! He had renounced his marriage with Christine Daaé. He had renounced all the things of above the earth."
According to the Persian, Erik originated from a small town near Rouen. He was the son of a masonry contractor. He had early fled the paternal home, where his ugliness was an object of horror and fright to his parents. For some time, he exhibited himself in fairs, where his impresario showed him as a "living dead man." He had to cross Europe from fair to fair and complete his strange education as artist and magician at the very source of art and magic, among the Gypsies. A whole period of Erik's existence was rather obscure. He is found again at the Nijni-Novgorod fair, where then he appeared in all his awful glory. Already he sang as no one in the world has ever sung; he did ventriloquism and gave himself to extraordinary juggling of which the caravans, on their return to Asia, still spoke, all along the road. Thus his reputation passed the walls of the palace of Mazenderan, where the little sultana, favourite of the sha-en-shah, was bored. A fur merchant, who was bound for Samarkand and returning from Nijni-Novgorod, told of the miracles he had seen under Erik's tent. The merchant was brought to the Palace, and the daroga of Mazenderan had to interrogate him. Then, the daroga was charged with seeking out Erik. He brought him back to Persia, where for some months he made, as they say in Europe, the rain and the fine weather. He committed thus quite a few horrors, for he seemed to know neither good nor evil, and he cooperated in some fine political assassinations as tranquilly as he fought, with diabolical inventions, the emir of Afghanistan, at war with the Empire. The sha-en-shah took him into friendship. It is at this moment that the Rose Hours of Mazenderan are placed, of which the daroga's account gave us a glimpse. As Erik had, in architecture, quite personal ideas and conceived a palace as a prestidigitator might imagine a combination casket, the sha-en-shah commissioned such a construction from him, which he brought to completion and which was, it seems, so ingenious that His Majesty could walk everywhere without being perceived and disappear without it being possible to discover by what artifice. When the sha-en-shah saw himself master of such a jewel, he ordered, as a certain Tsar had done regarding the gifted architect of a church on Red Square, in Moscow, that Erik's golden eyes be put out. But he reflected that, even blind, Erik could still build, for another sovereign, so unheard-of a dwelling, and then, finally, that, Erik living, someone had the secret of the marvellous palace. Erik's death was decided, as well as that of all the workmen who had laboured under his orders. The daroga of Mazenderan was charged with executing that abominable order. Erik had done him some services and made him laugh well. He saved him by procuring him the means to flee. But he nearly paid with his head for that generous weakness. Happily for the daroga, there was found, on the shore of the Caspian Sea, a corpse half eaten by sea birds which passed for that of Erik, because friends of the daroga had clothed that remains in effects having belonged to Erik himself. The daroga got off with the loss of his favour, his goods, and with exile. The Persian Treasury nevertheless continued, for the daroga was of royal race, to pay him a small allowance of some hundreds of francs a month, and it was then that he came to take refuge in Paris.
As for Erik, he had passed into Asia Minor, then gone to Constantinople where he entered the sultan's service. I shall have made understood the services he could render a sovereign haunted by all terrors, when I have said that it was Erik who constructed all the famous traps and secret chambers and mysterious strongboxes that were found at Yildiz-Kiosk, after the last Turkish revolution. It is still he[13] who had the imagination to fabricate automata dressed as the prince and resembling the prince himself to a fault, automata that made one believe the Commander of the Faithful was in one place, awake, when he rested in another.
Naturally, he had to leave the sultan's service for the same reasons that had made him flee Persia. He knew too much. Then, very weary of his adventurous and formidable and monstrous life, he wished to become someone like everybody else. And he made himself a contractor, like an ordinary contractor who builds houses for everyone, with ordinary bricks! He tendered for certain foundation works at the Opera. When he saw himself in the depths of so vast a theatre, his artistic, fanciful and magical nature took the upper hand again. And then, was he not still as ugly? He dreamed of creating for himself a dwelling unknown to the rest of the earth and that would hide him forever from the eyes of men.
One knows and guesses the rest. It is at length, of that incredible and yet true adventure. Poor unhappy Erik! Must one pity him? Must one curse him? He asked only to be someone, like everyone else! But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius or 'do tricks with it,' when, with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the noblest of the human race! He had a heart to contain the empire of the world, and he had finally to content himself with a cellar. Decidedly one must pity the Phantom of the Opera!
I have prayed, despite his crimes, over his remains and may God have pity on him indeed! Why did God make a man as ugly as that?
I am sure, quite sure, to have prayed over his corpse, the other day when they drew it from the earth, at the very spot where they buried the living voices; it was his skeleton. It is not by the ugliness of the head that I recognized him, for when they have been dead so long, all men are ugly, but by the gold ring he wore and that Christine Daaé had certainly come to slip upon his finger, before enclosing him, as she had promised him.
The skeleton was found quite near the little fountain, at that place where for the first time, when he drew her into the theatre's depths, the Angel of Music had held in his trembling arms the fainting Christine Daaé.
And now, what will they do with that skeleton? They will not throw it in the common pit?... I say: the place of the skeleton of the Phantom of the Opera is in the archives of the National Academy of Music; it is not an ordinary skeleton.
[Note 12: I was still speaking of this forty-eight hours before the appearance of this work, to M. Dujardin-Beaumetz, our so sympathetic under-secretary of state for fine arts, who left me some hope, and I told him that it was the duty of the State to put an end to the legend of the Phantom to re-establish upon indisputable bases the so curious history of Erik. For that, it is necessary, and it would be the crowning of my personal labours, to rediscover the House of the Lake, in which perhaps still lie treasures for musical art. No one doubts longer that Erik was an incomparable artist. Who tells us we shall not find in the House of the Lake, the famous score of his Don Juan Triumphant?]
[Note 13: Interview of Mohamed-Ali bey, on the morrow of the entry of the Salonika troops, at Constantinople, by the special envoy of Le Matin.]